Workflows for AutoCAD Electrical and Inventor Interoperability

DAVE LAPTHORNE: All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Appreciate you joining us for this look into some workflows for AutoCAD Electrical and interoperability across into the Inventor Cable and Harness environment and toolset. My name's Dave, Implementation Consultant with D3 Technologies. I'm based out of Springfield, Missouri. I'll be speaking to the Inventor side of things. My area of expertise and background is in Inventor machine design.

With me is Chad Artherhults, one of our other implementation consultants. He'll be presenting as our expert on the Electrical side of it. So as we're working with the two different software packages back and forth, Chad will be presenting those segments. So a little bit about ourselves.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: OK. So, hi, everyone. Like Dave said, my name's Chad. I've been working with-- well, a little bit about myself. I'm from a small town in Indiana called Marion, North Central Indiana, about an hour north of Indianapolis. I've been working with AutoCAD Electrical now for what? 18 years? Something like that-- before it was AutoCAD Electrical actually. There was a small company in Marion called VIA Development that had a little product called VIA WD. I started working for VIA. Six months after I started working for VIA, Autodesk came in and bought them out and turned VIA WD into AutoCAD Electrical.

So you could say I have some experience with it. I did a short stint with Autodesk, and then after that got into the reseller chain and have been working with various resellers now for 13 years, I think it is, covering AutoCAD Electrical. Yeah, so, that's a little bit about me.

DAVE LAPTHORNE: So again, my name's Dave, based out of the Springfield, Missouri office. You might be able to tell I'm not originally from Springfield, Missouri. Grew up in Australia, went through college down there, specializing, actually, working towards automotive engineering. So went through college at RMIT in Australia, and then spun off from there and started my own business doing subcontract design work, 2D and 3D engineering, back in the early 2000s.

And then came back to the States up to Northern Illinois and started into full-time work there doing machine design for a company up there, working primarily on large assembly systems. We were doing large circular carbide cut-off saws for production environments and rail yards and that type of thing. Focused primarily from that, went into more of a sheet metal design role, working through that side of things.

So that's where I first got my hands into the Cable and Harness environment. We were doing Telco enclosures. And so quite often, we'd need to put in our connectors and that type of thing, make sure we had clearances for fiber optic runs and things of that nature. So that's where I started into that.

My primary focus with D3, I train on the Inventor software tool package. So all of the standard Inventor stuff-- basic part modeling, over to the sheet metal stuff, Cable and Harness, as well as specializing into the CAM side of things. So I play around a lot in HSM, a lot of that type of stuff. And also spend a lot of time doing tech support. So I know I've spoken with some of the people here on-- have called us on tech support calls. So always good to see some of you guys here.

So that's a little bit about us. We're going to take a look here at some information on-- basically, I want to give you guys a high level of the data set that we're working with, what we've been putting together for this class. First off, to restate these learning objectives-- and these were kind of what you guys signed up for when you signed up to sit in on this class. So we're going to look at developing an understanding of how we set up the AutoCAD Electrical projects to work with Inventor. So Chad's got some demo stuff and a few slides that he'll talk through there, just to give an understanding of that process as we run through that.

We'll then flip back over to me, and I'll show how we set up our Inventor stuff to start working with that Electrical information, bringing that info in and being able to use that information within the Cable and Harness toolset. From there, we'll take a look at the process for design iterations. I'll go through, make some changes on the Inventor side, push that information across to Electrical, so Chad can rework the schematic there in the Electrical side. And then he'll throw some other stuff my way. We'll come back into Inventor, and we'll make those associated changes there in the Inventor space.

And then there'll be some tips and tricks on working with the Inventor Cable and Harness, and also the Electrical side of things. A few things to look out for and think about as you're going into the actual design to wind up running down this workflow. So that's the objectives, the information that we hope to be able to provide to you guys here over the next hour.

So here's the data set we're looking at. Here on the left side, we've got a schematic diagram that's being set up-- a bunch of our standard Electrical components in there. On the right-hand side, this is my world. This is where I like to live. I do the design, sheet metal box there and associate the components into that, build the assembly as we would, and then we start to bring the information through.

Now in the past, there has been a workflow to be able to do this-- utilizing the XML files. Has anybody pushed that XML data out from-- OK. So a couple of people have here. Good. So with that process worked really well for us. The biggest downside to it is that we've got to manage those files. We've got to make sure that, hey, I've done a change in Inventor, I've got to update the XML, I've got to let Chad know and make sure that information transfers through.

If I'm not staying on top of nicely tracking my changes and keeping those XMLs up to date or keeping just one XML file, then it can be pretty easy to have some miscommunication there. Chad might miss an email from me saying, hey, by the way, I updated this. The next thing we know, our actual design on the schematic side is completely wrong, because he's missing some components that I've got modeled. Or vice versa-- I don't have my wiring connections created properly and in most current, because of some changes that Chad has made.

So that was the old workflow. What we'll be looking at today is using the electromechanical link, that EMX file that we now have access to be able to create this live associated link between the two. So I think-- you sat in on that EMX class this morning. Do you want to give a little insight?

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: Yeah, absolutely. So how many of you guys sat in on a class this morning called "Electromechanical Avengers" taught by a few Autodesk employees? All right, so it looks like about half the room. All right, so we do cover a lot of the same material here in this class. But the good news is our-- the stuff that they covered in their class, we really get through in like the first 15 minutes or so of this class.

So hang out with us. We get into more practical examples of using the software and actually spend some time passing the data back and forth between the two pieces of software instead of just doing the initial setup and, hey, this looks really good. We want to show you guys what the actual workflow would look like between two engineers who are actually working together on a project at the same time. OK?

So I know there's a lot of overlap there. Good news for everybody who didn't go to that class-- we cover all of it. We'd walk you through the process of what it's going to take to do the setup, get your projects all rolling together, and then passing that information back and forth across with each other.

DAVE LAPTHORNE: Having seen-- I was not able to attend that class this morning, but having seen the handout, definitely worth grabbing if you haven't already and keeping that as a reference. Because as Chad said, we're taking 15 minutes to cover what they did in, what, a 90-minute session.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: Yeah.

DAVE LAPTHORNE: So they get a lot more into the nuts and bolts and all of the stuff behind the scenes that we just don't have time to cover in this class.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: All right. So let's see if I can pull this off without messing up the video. So the first thing we're going to be showing you guys, I'm going to run a little video here, a demo video, and I'm going to narrate over top of it to let you know the process of creating that electromechanical link file. So let me-- there we go.

All right. So first things first here. We're going to go to the Electromechanical tab, and we're going to go to the Electromechanical link button-- Electromechanical Link Setup button, excuse me. Really simple-- it's literally the only button there. So once you go there, simply click on the button.

DAVE LAPTHORNE: You broke it.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: I broke it. Let's try this again. Oh, yeah. You literally told me about that. So here we go. All right. So anyway, go to the Electromechanical Link Setup button. And once we are there, it will bring up this dialog box that will allow me to control whether I want to create a link-- or link-- we're going to link to an existing project file, or I want to set up or create a brand new one. And I can't hit the right spaces.

Sorry guys. I'm a little flustered here. Heart rate's a little high. First time teaching a training class-- or teaching a class in front of this many people.

So anyway, so we can go to Link there in that link screen there or the Link button to link to an existing EMX file if it's already out there. Or we can actually come in here and hit Create and create a brand new one. It is, in our opinion, best practice-- create the initial EMX from inside of AutoCAD Electrical. It just seems to work better that way.

So from here, after we hit the Create, and we then have to come in and feed it a file name. It can be whatever you want. Just a quick little tip-- don't put any spaces in there. It does some weird stuff if you put some spaces in there, I found out the hard way, as I was preparing my information.

Now from here, we have to go to a location that is readily accessible by both the mechanical engineer and the electrical engineer. So make sure you're dropping that and you're creating that EMX file in a place, in a location, where everybody has access to it.

So after you get that, you get actually this nice little congratulations dialog box telling you, hey, you've successfully created it. It's a really simple process. That's about as difficult as the whole thing gets right there. So after that pops up, it'll then come up with a new dialog box that will give you the information on the link file that has been created.

And it will tell you-- it'll run through and tell you what the name of the link file is, the shared folder. You guys-- you just populated that information, so it's not a big deal. It'll also tell you what linked Electrical project you have, it'll tell you what Inventor project file you're using and you're linked to, and also the name of the assembly that you're pulling from. Because as you guys know, when you're using Inventor-- for you Inventor guys, you have one project file that uses multiple-- or multiple assemblies use the same project file. It's one project file for everything.

In the Electrical realm, it's a lot different for you Inventor guys who don't know. You basically have one-- or you have a project file for each job. So it's kind of the way Inventor used to be back in the day before they went to the single project file environment. So you think of it more as a job file than a project file inside of Electrical for you Inventor guys. It'll make the process go a little easier for you.

So from there, we also have, like I said, we have the list of assemblies. I keep hitting the space bar. I'm not going back to it. We also have, down there, a link resolution dialog box. So in there, basically what it is is it comes in and it says, hey, if there's a difference between the data in AutoCAD Electrical versus in Inventor, which piece of data do we take? So if there's some sort of conflict, you can tell it which piece of software you want to control that, be it pin numbers are in disagreement or catalog information is in disagreement-- whatever it might be.

The good news is, with either one of them, it doesn't force that data to overwrite. What it actually does is you can go in and then tell it, hey, I want to bring these changes across. And we'll talk more about that as we come forward here. Oh, I got to restart the video. Dang it. Dave, your space bar's too close to the mouse button.

DAVE LAPTHORNE: Yeah.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: So anyway, we also have the ability to unlink a project file from right here. So if you have-- for whatever reason you want to close the connection between Inventor and Electrical, you do have the ability to do that. After you go there, you can go to your Project tab, and you have a Location View, which a lot of you guys have not used if you haven't gotten into this environment as of yet. From the Location View, you can actually expand out and see all the components that are in there. It's going to group it by installation code, then the location code, and then give you a list of all the components that are available.

So from in here, we have the Settings tab. And what the Settings tab actually does is allows us to set the settings on our sync. So we can come in here and tell it-- as a default, it just syncs when you-- actually, it doesn't even, on default, say on Save or Time Period. It just does it when you hit the Manual Sync button, which I'll show you guys in just a few seconds here. But what this does is actually allows you to set those automatic sync time, so it'll just happen in the background.

So you can set a timer here just by clicking that Sync Every. And it will give it a time limit, be it 15 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever you might want. And then you can also have it set up to run that sync every single time you save the Electrical file. I definitely suggest turning both of those options on and finding a time frame that's comfortable for you.

DAVE LAPTHORNE: To that point, Chad, with the-- on Save, does it do that with auto saves, or is that only on a manual save?

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: That's only on a manual save of the file. The AutoCAD auto save that does every 10 minutes or whatever it is by default, it won't do a sync on an auto save.

So from here, after we set those settings, we're going to go and click OK here to make sure it goes in. Now, I'm going to go back over to the location manager. And down here in the lower right-hand corner-- or lower left-hand corner-- we have this little button right here that actually doesn't look like a button. So when you come over here and click on this, that will manually run a sync of your data and push it up to the-- push it to the link file. OK? So you can actually run that sync at any point in time. It's not going to hurt anything.

It's also not going to-- this is something that I'd heard some concerns of early on, is that you have that whole linked conflict resolution thing. If I push a sync, is it going to overwrite the data on my Inventor parts? Or vice versa, if I push a sync from Inventor, is it going to start overwriting the data on my Electrical files? And it absolutely doesn't do that. It just pushes it to that central location. And they can both pull the information from there as they need to. It will never automatically change any of your catalog data or pin assignments on you. It's something that you're going to have to go in and decide which one of them is going to win that conflict resolution.

And that would be the end of it. Now I can finally hit space and move on.

DAVE LAPTHORNE: There you go.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: All right. So just to recap on what we just covered over there. Creating a linking EMX file from AutoCAD, you're just going to run the Electromechanical Link Setup on the Electromechanical tab. It's going to create that electromechanical link file for you, which is a .EMX file. Make sure your link file is in a location that's easily accessible to both Inventor and Electrical. So if you've got multiple people doing it, that needs to be in a location where they both can see it. And you need to designate your preferred program for conflict resolution. I personally always say always leave it at Electrical, but that's just me.

DAVE LAPTHORNE: That works fine for me. I want you to do all that, and I'll just worry about my model.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: So data sync will occur in the background and automatically with file saves and on a timer, depending on how you've set up the settings on that. So you have a lot of flexibility on when that data is going to get synced across.

DAVE LAPTHORNE: All right. Thanks, Chad.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: Yep.

DAVE LAPTHORNE: So Chad's now done all of that nice pre-work for us, and he's configured this schematic the way that we need in order to be able to actually wire our box up in Inventor. So I've got that assembly here. I showed the screenshot of it before. I'm going to walk you through the workflow-- what that looks like on my side of things when this information gets configured and Chad first messages me to say, hey, I've got that file ready to go for us.

So within Inventor, I've got this assembly setup here. And just as a bit of a walk-through of the basic configuration of this, we've got a sheet metal enclosure there. And as we mouse over here in the browser, we can see underneath that I have various models set up, whether that be hardware related to my enclosure itself or actual push buttons and connectors, PLCs, power supplies, control relays, that we need to be able to work with.

Now, a lot of these models have come in from third party. Those are Allen-Bradley controls there, and we've pulled the models. I actually brought these in-- brought them over from a 3D AutoCAD file, converted that to a STEP file, and pulled that into Inventor. And then I've gone into the Inventor environment and actually assigned-- we can see I've got additional holes that I've modeled in down here for my pin locations. That's not critical on this. It does help me to get things in the right location and make sure that my harness winds up looking pretty.

But basically, you'll see right here in Inventor, I have the Electromechanical tab as well. And this allows me to go out and find that link file that Chad set up. Or I can create my own link file within the Inventor environment also, if we wanted to run it that way.

So we'll go in and look at the Electromechanical Link Setup from the Inventor side. You'll notice we also have a location view. Right now that's grayed out. I haven't linked the file together. So I'm not looking at an EMX, so it doesn't have any of that location data for me to be able to work with. But here's the link setup dialog within Inventor-- very, very similar to what we saw in AutoCAD.

Here, we got the file name at the top. The next box underneath that allows us to look at the information. When we have these linked, it'll populate for me automatically with the AutoCAD Electrical project, as Chad mentioned. We'll also see any linked Inventor assemblies that have been pulled in there and linked together, the Inventor project that we're linked to also.

Then, down at the very bottom, we see that same information that we saw on Chad's side, in terms of that linked conflict resolution. So this can be changed on the fly. If Chad's gone through and he has stuff set up so that the AutoCAD Electrical information is gospel and so that pushes that information over to my side, I can come back through and say, you know what? I need to add a component in here, or I need to reroute some wires based on the schematic that Chad had initially configured. Pin outs are changing, and I was the first one to find out about it.

So I can reroute my wires in here, delete some out, reconnect them to the appropriate pin locations, switch my conflict resolution. It's going to pop up on Chad's side saying, hey, link resolution has changed. Do you want to accept these changes and roll with it? So that gives us a little bit additional help there to keep everything lined out and working properly.

So within Inventor right here, we'll see these two buttons to the right. This allows us to create a link file, if we needed to create that directly here in Inventor. Or the button next to it would allow us to browse to a different file if we need to link in. So we got that same information. We got our link file name. We specify that shared folder, just like Chad did. We want to make sure that that's somewhere accessible for both of us to be able to work from.

We did run into some issues with this as we were working through setting up this class. What we found seems to be one of the main triggers for some link loss was we're both working apart from each other. I'm out of Springfield, Missouri. He's out of Indiana. So we were dumping this file in a shared folder on a VPN location, where Chad was able to reach in in VPN and grab that. That seems to be having some inconsistent issues there. I was losing links on my side all the time. So that may be something you might just watch out for. If you are in a situation like that, definitely test it before you go into production with this type of workflow.

So we would specify-- oh, sorry. What?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] The electromechanical problem, how does that work with [INAUDIBLE] Vault?

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: OK. So, um, yeah. We don't cover Vault in this class at all. That was the earlier class. So basically, what it does, it does some weird voodoo that I've never seen any file dealing with Vault does. Because you can put it at a network location outside of your workspace, which is normally a no-no when dealing with Vault. And what it does is actually on the Electrical side of things, every single time you go to check in that project file, it creates a copy of that EMX file, puts it in your local workspace, and then checks in that copy of the EMX file from your local workspace. So it's just there as backup purposes, I guess. It puts it on-- they'll create an EMX subfolder. And then underneath it there will be this long string of characters in a secondary subfolder. And then the EMX file will be inside of there.

AUDIENCE: It's like it can, but you don't know exactly how well it works.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: No. It works perfectly with it. It's just-- it does some weird stuff, where it's only creating a backup in the Vault. The EMX file that's on your network or your shared network location is the one that's still getting all the information dumped into it. It just creates this weird backup copy and throws that backup copy into the Vault.

AUDIENCE: So you said as long as you check in, manually check in, [INAUDIBLE] your network location?

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: No. It's a copy. It creates a copy of the one that's on your network location in your local workspace, and then checks that one in.

AUDIENCE: It gets checked in when you check in your Electrical project.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: It gets checked in when you check in either your Electrical project or your Inventor assembly. Yes?

AUDIENCE: We're trying to figure out, basically, [INAUDIBLE].

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] it automatically [INAUDIBLE] the Refresh button or whatever.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: It will automatically check that file while it's updated, push that [INAUDIBLE]. It's very easy [INAUDIBLE].

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: So now-- so--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] the latest version, correct? And then [INAUDIBLE].

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: No, it won't. So that's--

AUDIENCE: OK. Well, now we're getting off tangent.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: No, no, no. That's perfectly fine. We got the time. It's good. Don't worry about it. So the copy that's in the Vault, like I said, it's just there for backup purposes. So as your user goes to grab the latest copy, he doesn't need to. He doesn't need to get that backup copy out of the Vault, because he's still going to be pointed to the one that the networks share.

AUDIENCE: So the best practice is to make sure it's on a network share [INAUDIBLE].

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: It has to be. It has to be. And we'll talk about this coming up here. But it has to be in a network location where both users have access to it.

AUDIENCE: OK. So if you're doing both sides yourself--

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: Yes. If you're working on it on both sides yourself, you can put it in your local workspace and everything's fine. It's still going to create a random backup copy of it. I don't know why, but it does. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: So, all right. So if you get completely finished with the project, check everything in, clear the file off of your network space, then you decide to go back in and you have to do a revision on it or updates on it or whatever, what you will actually-- I haven't tested this myself, but what you probably have to do is download that copy of the EMX file that was in the Vault, then manually copy it from your local workspace and put it in that network location. Or if you can just leave it in the network location, it would function perfectly fine out there.

The thing of it is is that EMX file, it's used to pass information back and forth between the two projects. It doesn't actually-- it's not containing any sort of business critical information that you'd need to do any sort of revision management with it. It just passes the information back and forth between the two of them. It's passing information from the Electrical project database directly to Inventor and all the metadata that goes along with Inventor. So it just acts as a tunnel basically between the two. So let it sit out there, you know? Yes?

AUDIENCE: So it sounds like you'll have a lot of these EMX files. Will they-- do you put them in all in one folder that you will then-- do you archive or save that folder and all these EMX for all these different projects? If you take this Electrical enclosure versus another enclosure, does that get archived and needs to be backed up?

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: OK. So we don't have a best practice on whether you should put them in individual folders or all in one folder together. I would put them in a central location. And if it was me, I would put them in separate subfolders, just for ease of, you know, here's what projects this is associated with instead of just dealing with file names, in case someone comes up with a file name that doesn't really correspond to the file that you're working with. For archival purposes--

AUDIENCE: Like here, later, I'm going to go in there, and I walk by one of these-- if I check both of the AutoCAD Electrical and the Vault folder out, will they know where it is? Or which one of them is going to push and get the information from each other?

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: So they will both-- because they had the link created when you checked them into the Vault-- they will both want to look at that network directory. And if the file's not there, they'll come back and say it can't find the file. So then that's where you take that backup copy that got checked into the Vault, grab the latest copy of it, and then manually throw it at that network location.

AUDIENCE: Make the Vault as your back-up.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: Yeah, Vault is just there to backup that EMX file in that instance.

AUDIENCE: Save a step. If you want to get that EMX file out of the Vault, you can do a "Get" on that file. And then a way-- when you're using the "Get" function in Vault, you can specify a folder. It doesn't have to drop in automatically into the temporary folder it was created in. You could specify to push it back to that network drive. This way you have the [INAUDIBLE] and the [INAUDIBLE] all in one step.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: Yeah, that's a really good point, Chris. Let me go ahead and repeat that for the recording, so the people, for posterity, can hear it as well. When you go to do a "Get" of a file outside of the Vault, you don't have to necessarily say, drop that file in my local workspace. You can give it a target location of where you want the download to go to, so you could use that functionality to put it onto that network drive location. Yes?

AUDIENCE: Do you need to define the installation code here?

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: I'm sorry?

AUDIENCE: Do you have to define the installation code?

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: OK. So you guys can see from my example, no installation, no location codes defined. You don't have to. It is-- it'd be a good idea to, just as general designing purposes. But, no, it absolutely does not have to be defined.

DAVE LAPTHORNE: Yeah. In fact, this entire data set that we're demoing, we'll see here when I get my location pulled up-- my Location View in Inventor-- it's got question marks there next to the installation and location, just indicating that that hasn't been assigned. So you can work with those not being assigned, for sure.

AUDIENCE: Is it best to define both?

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: It would be a good idea to, yes. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people, especially doing NFPA schematics, have a tendency to not use installation codes I have found with my experience. But location codes are commonly used. So you don't have to use both of them. It'd be a good idea to use a location code, and you can use an installation code as well if you want. But again, they don't have to be used.

AUDIENCE: It's just time-consuming.

CHAD ARTHERHULTS: Yeah, I get it. I understand. There's a reason my data set doesn't have any of them in it. I get it.

DAVE LAPTHORNE: All right. I appreciate the questions. There was some good interaction and dialogue there. All right. So we'll hop back to looking some more here at Inventor. So we had looked at-- I'd shown you what it looks like if we were to be creating that EMX file here in Inventor. Clicking this button right here will give us access to that dialog.

This next button right here, this is the process we're actually going to take for this, and this allows us to link to an existing EMX file. In this case, this is where we're going to browse and find that one that Chad created. And we'll pull that in right here and start linking the AutoCAD Electrical info into the Cable and Harness world.

So we'll go and find that one, select that. And when we hit Open, as soon as that loads up, what we're going to see right here is some information populates showing us now the logical name for that file and where it's saved. Additionally, we also see the information regarding the linked AutoCAD Electrical project that we're tying to. Beneath that we also see the Inventor assemblies that are using this. So in this case, it's just this one enclosure assembly. It also is populated with the Inventor project information, as well as confirmation of the link conflict resolution where that guy's coming from. So this matches to what Chad had configured there in Electrical.

One thing to note with this-- the linked Electrical project, you can only link to one using an EMX. You can only link one Electrical project in. Inventor has some additional stuff to allow us to have different assemblies tied into pulling that same information. So if we were to zoom back on this overall design, I've got my enclosure here. But if we look at the schematic outside of that, I've got a three-phase to 110 transformer. That's not in the context of this particular box, but it is still on that schematic. So I could link that information across in there in order to tie that to multiple projects.

The other thing with this, with it being linked to one project, that actually writes that information into the EMX file. And so if you then go from another Electrical project and you try to set up an Electromechanical link and you grab a file that's already tied to something else, you're going to get an error telling you, hey, you can't use this, this is in use by something else. There is a way around it, and it involves Notepad and deleting some stuff. And if anyone wants to see that, I'm happy to show that after class here. But a little bit of a work-around on some stuff there.

OK. So we're going to accept this setup right here and link these designs together. And now having done that, we see Inventor has automatically ungrade my location view. And now I'm seeing that Location View panel opened up here on the right-hand side. So this lists out all of our components that are in Inventor. And you see if I click on this top one right here, that does actually highlight across in my browser, as well as highlighting that connector here in my model. So I can quickly look through and see what these guys are.

For a lot of these components, for the purpose of the exercise, I've tagged them just with some text labels, so that I can quickly run through this next part. It's certainly something that you can do just to give you that visual in there. If I'm not working on Electrical design all the time, I don't know the difference between this PLC power supply and the other component. I'm going to throw a label on there, so that I can make my job as easy as possible.

So each one of these parts indicated here with the Inventor kind of part icon, that's one of our components on the Inventor side. Underneath that we can see a list of pins that I've got there. The next button down that I've expanded out, that's the information that's coming through from the Electrical side. So each one of these is a pin name in the Electrical schematic.

This is one critical thing to note as you're going through this workflow. Because Inventor's Cable and Harness allows us to make those pin-to-pin connections from a point to another point, when we start working this stuff in from the AutoCAD Electrical side which handles all of our schematic work, we need to make sure that this component has the same pin naming that my Electrical schematic does. If you don't have that, it's not going to know which pins we need to run through. So this is very critical to make sure that this matches.

And a word of warning here on this, particularly as we'll see in a little bit when I zoom in on this PLC201 component right here, that has an array of pins in it-- basically, a pattern of pins. When I was first working through this and getting everything set up a few months back, I went in and dropped that as a pin group, which we might typically use for any of those patents, usually more on a ribbon cable type of thing. Just be aware that there's some restrictions with the pin group over, say, a single or discrete pin. And that particularly comes down to the naming of those pins.

You're only able to assign-- I'm trying to think now-- it's a one or a two alpha followed by a number as the designator for that. So where that comes into play is like on some of my control relays, where the pinouts are 1x4 or something like that. And so if I put those in as a pin group, I wouldn't be able to assign that information appropriately. So just be aware of that, because these pins absolutely have to match to the information from Electrical.

So any one of these components down through here, we're able to link to. If we notice this one that I've expanded right now, that T104, that's that three-phase to 110 transformer that's somewhere else in my design. So just because it exists in my Location View right here in Inventor, I don't have to use it in this particular design. So that transformer's somewhere else. I'm going to wire to it at some point, when I hang this thing on my test bench. But for right now, in the assembly that I'm working in, I'm good to go with just ignoring that.

So the next step that we take, having linked these together and Inventor now knows, OK, I've got wiring information coming through from Electrical, I need to pull that information and link it to these components, what we actually have to do right here is selecting one of these Electrical icons there on the right side. We'll do a right-click operation. And we're going to basically tell it, OK, we know that these two exist. This electrical symbol is actually associated with this model.

The way that I'm running through this for the purposes of this class, I'm just Assigning to Existing in the Assembly. There's a whole other bunch of stuff we could get into in terms of incorporating that stuff in from the Electrical catalog browser, if we have that installed. For the purposes of this class, I'm just going to be assigning these to existing models within the assembly.

So a pretty straightforward and simple process for this. I'll simply right-click on the component here. And we'll do a-- from the options there, we're going to grab a hold of the Assigned to Existing in Assembly. We'll see first option, our catalog browser. That second option allows us to make that assignment. So once I click on that, it's going to allow me to bring my pointer across into the design, and I can just pick on any one of these components that matches to that. And then Inventor's going to link those together and displays that little chain icon right there indicating that, hey, these two are now linked together.

So I'll run through that process a few more times to get everything else linked up here. One interesting thing to note-- if I'm doing this Assigned to Existing, and I go and grab a connector or component that's already been linked to, Inventor's not going to allow me to do that. It's a one-to-one. So this one symbol in Electrical is this one component right here. Just same way that we'd really be approaching things on the AutoCAD Electrical side, too.

So in that case, we can just close that and we go ahead and relink. So Assign to Existing, I'll go and grab the other connector. And so this process is just a rinse and repeat all the way through. I'll jump forward in my video here a little bit. We'll see as we're going through. And so I'll continue to assign all of these out. Now, notice as I'm doing this, this is just creating those connections right there. I don't actually have any wires run as yet. That's going to be the next step that we'll look at. So I'll go ahead and continue rolling this on through.

The main critical thing to note with this-- when you're going to do this next step of creating the connection, basically pulling those schematic information in and do the pin-to-pin, I need to make sure that I'm-- if in this case, I've got an existing harnesses set up in here with some harness segments in it for routing, I need to make sure that that's activated. If I don't have that activated, and I try to run the Create Connection workflow, Inventor will throw me a dialog to create a new harness piece right there.

So nothing wrong with that. We can certainly work through it that way. In this case, I need to make sure I activate that, because I already have my segments that I'm wanting to utilize. So we go in, and we can see I've got those segments in there. The next critical thing to be aware of, we've already talked about that pin naming. The other thing that we need to be critically aware of as we're going into this is our wire-naming convention. Just like the pins have to match, the wire names that are used in Electrical have to match up to the wire names that we have set up in Inventor.

So I'm in my wire library right now. And you'll see a slight difference in the naming convention of these ones that are in the generic versus these ones down the bottom that I'm going to be using. So I've gone in and I've set these guys up to make sure that I've got my 16-gauge blue in here. And the naming convention matches exactly to what's used in Electrical.

So we'll go through that. Having got that set up, the next thing that we'll do, we'll close out of the library. We'll come across here. And through a right-click operation, right here on the Location View right at the top where those question marks are right now, because we haven't populated the location codes, that's where we do the Create Connection operation. And this is where Inventor actually starts to bring that information across into this and start building these out.

Now, this is going to take a while for this to run. So I'll skip forward in the video a little bit. But basically what it's doing is it's looking at each of those pin-to-pins in the Electrical schematic. Pulls that in, looks at the wire types, pulls that from the library, and throws all of these in there for us.

So we'll bounce through this. And that's the net result. Here's all those wires that have been configured very nicely by Chad and Electrical. I haven't had to worry about screwing this up by grabbing the wrong pins as I'm going through. And we've got everything associated appropriately.

These are just standard wires of course, so we can use all of our regular Cable and Harness tools to automatically route these in and run them into those segments that I'd set up earlier. Again, this one takes a little bit of time as it processes everything. But there's the end result. Everything's been pulled in directly from Electrical. It's been routed automatically straight into those. So we've got a nice, tidy wiring loom to work with.